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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu response:

http://www.asoftsite.org/s9y/archives/162-What-is-this-Multi...

Basically, this is a quick and dirty way to gather some usage data. Seems reasonable to me.

You don't gather usage data without informing the individual you are gathering it from. It's a violation of privacy. This is completely unreasonable.

So any website that uses any forms of analytics (gathering usage data without informing the individual) is violating your privacy, and acting in "completely unreasonable" ways? If personal data was being collected, that would be a clear violation of privacy, but adding a simple bit of metadata to a GET request to get general statistics is completely reasonable by my book.

There's a fine line in play here. Websites are opt-in, as are OSes, but I don't think many people think of Firefox as 'Ubuntu Firefox', and rightfully don't expect that their OS is going to tamper with the expected behavior of known, third party programs. For the normal user[1], this is a 'browser lock-in' that seems worse than what everyone got mad at Microsoft for.

[1] By normal user, I mean the non-Linux-guru type that wouldn't think to try all the nonobvious workarounds. This clearly is no problem to the 'You only get to use Linux if you submit patches' crowd, but should be a big problem for roughly every other open source free software crowd.

Also, where did this headline come from? Compare:

Canonical Will Own Your Search: New mandatory Ubuntu plugin takes over Firefox

vs.

Bug #402767: multisearch add on blocks the functionality of firefox location bar

And how many parts of the top one are actually true? Maybe none?

You can't submit a bug without a specific problem. A title like "Multisearch breaks user trust" wouldn't fly.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 "Microsoft has a majority market share"

If you really think that "Multisearch breaks user trust" is the problem then maybe you should file that bug.

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